Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Friday July 26, 2013 @11:03AM
from the trust-no-one dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Following the /. story on the Feds demanding SSL keys, now comes news that the feds are demanding user passwords, and in some cases, the encryption algorithm and salt used. From the article: 'A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'" ... Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. ... Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.' I'm next expecting to see the regulation or law demanding that all users use plain text for all web transactions, to catch terrorists and for the children."

They can ask. All passwords are one-way hashed using a 16384 bit salt and run through 4,000 rounds of AES before being stored in the database. Over there in the corner is our custom-built core which does the password retrieval, comparison, and pass-fail out onto a RADIUS server. The network name is NSA_COCKBLOCK... feel free to have a copy of the algorithm and database.

Credit cards? You think small. How about getting access to the Federal Reserve? Considering all the money they give away to bail out financial institutions that should be in receivership, you could probably take a few billion and it would be dismissed as a rounding error.